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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780316930161 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Little, Brown and Company |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2000 |
| Edition description: | 1ST BACK B |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 275,430 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Background CheckOn the Saturday before Christmas 1992, I was feeling lucky. A few weeks earlier, with my help, Bill Clinton had been elected president —and soon I'd be working for him in the White House. But first I had to visit the Rose Law Firm. If you've read John Grisham, you've got a pretty good idea what Rose Law was like —Little Rock's version of "The Firm." Not that anyone's ever been murdered there (as far as I know), but its pedigree, power, and aura of buttoned-down mystery had made it a force in Arkansas for more than a century. It was also Hillary Rodham Clinton's firm.
All that made me a little nervous as I walked through the empty streets of Little Rock. I knew my background check was just a formality and believed I had nothing to hide. Still, I couldn't help worrying as I crossed the parking lot and, as instructed, let myself in the back door.
Waiting for me in the conference room was Webster L. Hubbell, a Little Rock legend —football star, former mayor, former judge, law partner of Hillary, golf partner of Bill. We had met only once before, and I thought of him as part of a pair. Webb and Vince. Hubbell and Foster. Vince Foster was Hillary's other close partner, and closer friend. Upright, quiet, and rail thin, Vince reminded me of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Webb looked more like the linebacker he once was. A massive man with a beefy grip and thick lips that made you forget there was a brain behind all that brawn.
I had often heard their names invoked by the Clintons, as in, "I spoke to Webb, and he thinks . . ." Or "Vince isn't sure about that. . . ." It was a way to end the argument. Webb and Vince meant influence, integrity, and judgment. We lived in parallel but separate worlds. They were Little Rock; I was Washington. They were lawyers; I was an operative. They were friends; I was staff.
"This shouldn't be too difficult," Hubbell assured me as we shook hands across the table. First, he asked the basics: where I went to school and whom I had worked for. Then more serious stuff: Had I ever been arrested? Any money problems —potential conflicts or large debts? Unlike, say, Bob Rubin (the Wall Street investment banker and incoming head of the National Economic Council), who probably needed half a law firm to vet his portfolio, I had no stocks or bonds. My only investments were a mortgaged condo in the Adams Morgan section of Washington and a small 401K from my work on Capitol Hill. The financial review took about a minute.
"Drugs?"
"About what you'd expect," I replied. "A little marijuana in high school and college, but I haven't touched it in years. Nothing else."
Then came a couple of oblique questions about my "social life," designed to give me an opportunity —if it were true —to admit to being gay or the secret father of a small child. We both knew where Webb was going. He was circling in on the one big question. I had been summoned here so that this man, who symbolized probity and proximity to the next president, could lean over the table, look me in the eye, and say, "Now George, I want you to think hard about this. Is there anything at all, anywhere in your past, that could ever come back to embarrass the president?" From now on, everything I said or did would reflect on Clinton and affect our mission, even if it happened long ago. The president's welfare had to be my first concern; everything else came second. In return, I would get to be part of something bigger than I ever imagined.
"Well," I began, "you should know I'm the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI." Republican complaints had forced a probe to see if I had conspired with Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh to damage the Bush campaign. I hadn't, but maybe it would lead to something else —like the time I tried to prove that Dan Quayle was a drug dealer.
In the fall of 1988, when the Dukakis campaign was going down the tubes, I was part of a "rapid response" team doing a remarkably ineffectual job of rebutting Republican attacks. But late in the race, a federal prisoner named Brett Kimberlin (aka the Speedway Bomber) was telling reporters he once sold drugs to Dan Quayle, and that Quayle might have sold some himself. A rumor reached me that years earlier, a grand jury examining the evidence had covered it up under pressure from prosecutors close to Quayle's family. If I could find the disgruntled grand jurors and convince them to talk, we'd win —and I'd be a hero.
So I bought a plane ticket to Indianapolis and holed up in the airport Holiday Inn with photocopied courthouse records. After a day of cold-calling people who had no idea what I was talking about, I knew I was on a fool's errand. My sleuthing wasn't illegal, just criminally incompetent and a little slimy. I suppose we would have used the information if it were true, but how naive and desperate could I have been to believe that I would uncover a last-minute bombshell that every news organization in America had missed? That was embarrassing —maybe not to President-elect Clinton, but certainly to me.
After racking my brain looking for trouble, I even told Webb about the night before I left for college, when I went out egging cars with my high school buddies one last time. Not much to report or worry about. Nothing in my background would keep me out of the White House.
I was born the second child of a solid Greek family in Fall River, Massachusetts, and baptized George after my grandfather, a missionary priest who left the Peloponnesian village of Neohorio in 1938 for Montana to minister to Greek immigrants scattered across America's west. His job was to make sure the members of the flock kept their faith as they sought their fortunes, to remind them of who they were and where they came from. More than a place of worship, the immigrant church was a piece of home. A year after his arrival, just before the war, my grandfather was joined by his family. The oldest was a five-year-old boy they called Lamby, Bobby, who would also grow up to be a priest —and my father.
A boy when he sailed from Patras in 1912, my mother's father worked on the railroads from Ellis Island to Salt Lake City before settling in Rochester, Minnesota, where he opened a shoe repair shop. Only after he made his start did he return to his village, Kalithea, to bring the teen bride chosen for him back to America. When he died in 1974, his business was the oldest in town, and his fellow merchants marched down Main Street in his memory. But he was most proud of the fact that all five of his children, including my mom, Nikolitsa, had attended college.
My parents met at a church youth convention in Minneapolis, where my mom was studying public relations at the University of Minnesota. Dad was on a field trip from seminary, and there was probably no better place to meet a woman willing to become a presbytera literally "priest's wife" —a word that captures the idea that everybody in the family of a priest has a responsibility to the family of the church. The presbytera is a kind of first lady. She has an official role as hostess and helpmate but can't let people get the idea she's assuming authority that isn't hers. The daughters, like my sisters, Stacy and Marguarite, sing in the choir and teach Sunday school. The sons, like my brother, Andrew, and me, become altar boys.
I was only four when I first served. Going to the office with my dad meant going to church. He would slap a little Mennen on my cheeks after he shaved, and we would head to the place only men could go —the altar, an inner sanctum separated from the rest of the congregation by a screen of icons. Often it was just the two of us back there. I would watch him whisper prayers as he vested himself in satin robes. Then I would hold out my own robe for him to bless, and the service would begin.
My first job was carrying a candle, making sure to hold it straight without staring at the flame. Once a year an altar boy forgot, hypnotizing himself and fainting to the floor. Responsibilities increased with age and size: Bigger boys took lanterns, and the biggest carried the cross. My favorite job was tending the censer. After placing a pebble of incense on the charcoal in its gold bowl, I got to walk backward, waving the perfumed smoke in my father's path as he carried the bread and wine around the altar.
I soon became a reader as well. When I was six, the bishop came to my father's new parish in Rye, New York, and placed his stole on my head before clipping a bit of my hair to symbolize my servitude to the church. "Axios," the bishop proclaimed. "He is worthy." Axios echoed back from the pews —a word weighted with expectation, a word I would hear again if I were ordained. On Sundays after that I would read the Epistle or recite the creed, remembering to speak "loud and slow" —the instructions my dad silently mouthed to me before I faced the congregation. At nine, I appeared on my biggest stage yet. Archbishop Iakovos opened our church convention with a liturgy at Lincoln Center, and I was chosen to stand by his side and hold his staff. Monday's New York Daily News ran a picture of the bearded prelate in a tall gold crown next to a small boy with bangs and hands clasped in front of him. For a day, I was a star.
But most of my work was backstage. Maybe one reason I've never been queasy about the grubby work of politics, the mechanics of running campaigns and making laws, is that I spent so many of my early days behind the altar screen, where mystery is rooted in the mundane, where faith and duty are one, where my father's prayers were my cues. Agios o Theos. . . . Get the candles. Wisdom, let us attend. . . . Lanterns and cross for the Gospel. No one who is bound by carnal desires is worthy to approach. . . . Light up the censer and line up the other boys. The doors, the doors . . . Read the creed. Our Father . . . Heat the water for Holy Communion. O Lord, who blesses those who bless thee . . . Cut the bread.
Behind the screen, I learned to stay composed in the presence of power and was swayed by the illusion of indispensability. After all, the miracle of transubstantiation couldn't happen that Sunday if I forgot to boil water on the hot plate in the room off the altar. Altar boys are as much like young operatives as little monks. We serve the priest so he can save everyone else, doing the little things that need to be done. Sometimes I got lost in the details, lost sight of the spiritual essence of the service we were producing, but I hoped that doing the right things in the right place at the right time would help do some good and save some souls, including my own, even when I was just doing my job.
All this was also preparation for what I would eventually do —but not in the way I imagined. I assumed I would be a priest before I knew what it meant. That's what my father did, and my grandfather, and my godfather, and my uncle, and all their friends. When I recall summer barbecues, I see them lounging in plastic-webbed lawn chairs, highballs in hand, wearing the hot-weather uniform —short-sleeved black dress shirts with detachable cleric's collars that flopped to the side when the top button was unfastened. By night's end, even our backyard became a kind of church. Smoldering briquettes and burnt-orange cigar butts served up the social equivalent of candlelight and earthy incense as my dad and his buddies sipped Greek brandy and sang Byzantine hymns.
As soon as I could talk, I knew how to answer the question of what I would be. At home, I would preside at play liturgies with a towel draped over my shoulders, or sneak through piles of books in my dad's office to suck on the sweet metallic stem of his pipe while tapping out a pretend sermon on his typewriter. When my father was finishing his doctorate in theology, I added a twist, telling dinner guests I would be "a priest and a theologian," relishing the weight of the big word as it rolled off my seven-year-old tongue. Everyone smiled at my use of a word I didn't really understand, while I basked in the attention that was my reward for carrying on a family tradition.
But sometimes an expectation nurtured through childhood can come undone in a single moment. In 1974, when I was thirteen, my final eighth-grade assignment was a paper on a potential career. As expected, I wrote on being a priest and brought home my A. But that autumn, after we moved from New York to Cleveland, I started high school, and it hit me. I was sitting in homeroom one morning shortly before eight, thinking about nothing in particular, when the idea that I wasn't meant to be a priest, that I wouldn't bear the family legacy into the next generation, revealed itself with an intensity others must feel when called to the priesthood. I hadn't lost my faith, just my vocation, but I knew the decision was final. I was growing up and growing away from the only future I had allowed myself to imagine. Now if only I could tell my father, and my grandfather. When asked about my future, I started to slip around the questions until they stopped. I didn't know yet what I wanted —just what I didn't want, and that whatever career I chose had to be worthy.
I also felt a need to answer to my extended family. Greeks came to America from dozens of islands and hundreds of villages, but here they formed a single clan, united by heritage, language, and a need to achieve. Those of us in the second generation understood that honoring the sacrifices of our parents and grandparents —the laborers, cobblers, waiters, and cooks —meant getting a good education and putting it to good use —as doctors, lawyers, professors, and politicians. Assimilation for Greeks didn't mean blending in; it required standing out. If a Greek like Ike Pappas was on television, all of us watched; if another like Nick Gage wrote a book, all of us read it; when Congressman John Brademas missed his chance to be Speaker of the House, we all felt his loss; when Vice President Agnew resigned, we all felt ashamed —a disgrace lessened only by the grumbled observation that he got what he deserved for changing his name and leaving his church. The rules were so clear they didn't need to be said: Make your name, and don't change it. Make us proud, and don't forget where you came from. Drilled into me were two awkwardly compatible ambitions: public service and professional success. Priests serve; immigrants succeed. I would try to do both.
But first I wanted to blend in. Here's where I'm my mother's son. As a boy, I would spend hours upstairs, lying on the floor with my feet pressed against the radiator, leafing through yearbooks to find pictures of my mom —a pretty girl with dark hair and a wide smile whose American friends called her Gloria instead of her Greek name. Her picture was everywhere: Gloria at the newspaper, Gloria in the glee club, Gloria behind the wheel of an old jalopy filled with friends.
In high school, that's the life I wanted. I still served in the altar and studied enough to get good grades. But I wanted to be one of the guys. So I snuck onto the golf course next door, went to the track, and played poker on Friday nights with the money I earned on Saturdays as a caddie, dishwasher, and busboy. I noticed girls, but they didn't notice me.
Politics didn't interest me. Instead, I poured myself into sports. I was a chubby kid, pretty well coordinated, decent at soccer and softball, but no natural athlete. I was barely five feet tall, so instead of basketball, I tried out for wrestling. The first practice was murder. Afterward, I could barely drag myself to the car out front, where my mom was waiting for me. I got in and announced I was quitting. Then came a surprise. Usually my mom let me do what I wanted so long as I stayed out of trouble. This time she just said, "No. Stick it out."
I'm still grateful. Not that I became a champion, far from it. I lost my first match 19‹2 and never caught up. I guess I never developed the killer instinct. Before a bout I would look up at the clock from the side of the mat and remind myself that win or lose, the ordeal would soon be over. You could pretty much sum up my high school wrestling career with an item from our local paper my sophomore year: "The agony of defeat is etched in the face of Orange High School's George Stephanopoulos," read the caption beneath a picture of me getting pinned.
Wrestling, in short, was more about what the sport did to me than what I did to my opponents. Cutting weight was an extreme exercise in self-control. I woke up extra early to run a mile or two before school; did sit-ups and push-ups while watching TV at night. I dieted on oranges and ran through the school hallways wrapped in plastic to sweat out that last pound. Even water had to be rationed in the hours before weigh-ins. To this day, when I put my mouth to a fountain I unconsciously count the sips. On Labor Day freshman year, I weighed 120 pounds. By November, I was wrestling at 98. My body showed me what it could take, which helped my mind turn around and instruct my body to take a little more. Though I wasn't a champion, what lingered for me was an addiction to exercise and a belief in the power of discipline.
But for all my desire to be one of the guys, I still wanted to excel —and it wouldn't be as an athlete. Columbia University spoke to my ambition in a different way. It was in New York City. It offered a distinctive core curriculum based on the great books, music, and art of Western civilization, and no one from my high school had gone there in decades.
I thrived at Columbia, and junior year I had my first taste of Washington life, as a summer intern for our congresswoman, a Democrat named Mary Rose Oakar. The big legislative debate that summer was about Reagan's budget. I helped write speeches explaining how it would hurt Oakar's constituents in the working-class ethnic enclaves of Cleveland. Before that experience, I had considered volunteering for George Bush in 1979 and voted for John Anderson in 1980. But working against Reagan's budget made me a Democrat. I didn't think supply-side economics would work, and I didn't believe it was fair. Perhaps it wouldn't have happened had I had a different summer job, but unlike the millions of Democrats whom Reagan inspired to vote Republican, I was a Republican he pushed the other way.
By 1982, my senior year, I still didn't know what I would do with my life. Law school seemed like the natural choice: finishing school for ambitious liberal arts majors who didn't know exactly what they wanted to do. It would also meet the Greek standard for achievement. The only problem with law school was that when it was over I would be in real danger of becoming a lawyer.
I almost leaped in a completely different direction. As a volunteer Big Brother whose major was international politics, I was drawn to the Peace Corps and applied one day on an impulse. Around eight the next morning, I got a call from the on-campus recruiter: "George, you're in. We've got a spot, but you have to say yes right now." I did, and went back to sleep. An hour later, I made a pot of coffee and wondered what I had done. Teaching English in Tunisia seemed like good work, but it didn't speak to the part of me that wanted to play on a bigger stage, in a world where a single act could affect the lives of millions. It didn't satisfy my drive for secular success. After my second cup, I called back and said no.
I wanted to do good and do well. Returning to Washington offered the promise of both. At Columbia's work-study office, I saw an announcement for internships at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and won a job where I wrote book reviews and helped draft speeches about nuclear arms control, the subject of my senior thesis. The only problem was that the stipend ran out after six months. Unless I found something else, I had promised my parents that I would spend the next six months as a paralegal in Cleveland before starting law school in the fall.
I couldn't have planned what came next. Everyone needs a break or two to get ahead. Mine came the night Norman Mayer was shot.
Norman Mayer was an older man with a deep tan who wandered the streets of Washington in a nylon windbreaker, sunglasses, and a golf cap, looking like the caddie master at a country club gone to seed. He too was working on disarmament, but in his own peculiar way. If he caught your eye on the street, he would hand over a pamphlet that promised ten thousand dollars to anyone who could actually prove that nuclear weapons prevent nuclear war —a pretty lucid point for a deranged person. Occasionally, Mayer walked into our offices off Dupont Circle to lobby for his proposal. Since I was the lowest person on the totem pole, he was my responsibility. I'd offer him a sandwich, and we'd chat uncomfortably until I could find a reason to excuse myself and usher him out the door. Not exactly what I had in mind when I imagined Washington power lunches, but Norman seemed harmless enough. Until December 8, 1982.
When I returned from lunch, my boss was waiting for me with a weak smile. "Your friend is holding the Washington Monument hostage," he said. "You'd better call the police."
Dressed in a homemade space suit, Norman Mayer had driven a van he said was loaded with dynamite up to the monument and threatened to blow it up unless he could broadcast his plan to prevent nuclear war. Washington was paralyzed, and the world was watching on live television. After I called the police, reporters started calling me.
So began my first foray into a media feeding frenzy —one of those times when everyone in the country responsible for bringing "the news" to the rest of us focuses for a moment on a single event. TV bookers who fill the airwaves with talking heads work the phones to find anyone with even the most tangential connection to the event. That day, that someone was me: I was the guy who knew the guy who was holding Washington hostage. Nightline sent a limo. I actually said, "Well, Ted . . ." on national TV, before telling what little I knew about Norman. My parents made a video, and calls came in from friends all over the country. To top it all off, a newly elected congressman from Cleveland named Ed Feighan was watching —one day after I had applied for an entry-level position in his office.
Feighan called the next day: "If you can get yourself on Nightline, maybe you can do some good for me." The job title was legislative assistant, which meant I would draft letters, memos, and speeches on whatever the congressman was working on. The salary was more than double my intern's stipend —$14,500 a year.
I was thrilled with my new job but spooked by how I got it. Norman Mayer had been bluffing. There was no dynamite in his truck. But the police couldn't know that, so they shot him down near midnight when he tried to drive off the Mall. It's not my fault Norman got shot. I didn't drive the van or pull the trigger. Why couldn't he just surrender after making his point? Besides, I would have gotten the job anyway. I'm qualified, I'm from Cleveland, I'll work hard. Still . . . No, it wasn't my fault Norman got shot, but I couldn't escape the fact that his fate was my good fortune.
Around this time, one of my new friends, Eric Alterman, introduced me to his mentor, the legendary journalist I. F. Stone. Nearing eighty, Stone had spent the last fifty years covering Washington on his own in his own way, always exposing hypocrisy, always challenging power, never getting too close to it. Eric arranged for us to meet at the bagel bakery on Connecticut Avenue. I can still see Stone at a small table, picking at his late afternoon lunch of a toasted bagel, raisins, and a cup of tea. With his wispy curls and clear eyes, he looked like Yoda come to life in a fraying flannel suit.
"You've covered Washington so long," I asked, "weren't you ever tempted to go into politics yourself?"
"Once," he answered. Sixty-five years earlier, when Izzy was in high school, the political "boss" of his class had offered him a place on the editorial board of the school paper —his dream job —in return for campaign help. But whatever temptation Izzy felt was quickly overwhelmed by a wave of nausea and a vow never to approach active politics again.
I respected that sentiment, envied it, felt slightly shamed by it, but didn't share it. My new work seemed too thrilling to renounce, and I was a natural at the game of politics: at knowing who knew what I needed to know, at absorbing the rhythms of legislative life by walking the halls, at preparing committee hearing questions for my boss that might get picked up by the press, at learning to anticipate his political needs and to use his position to advance my issues too, at succumbing to the lure of the closed room and the subtle power rush that comes from hearing words I wrote come out of someone else's mouth.
A democracy needs people like Izzy on the outside to keep it honest, but it also needs people on the inside to make it work —people who will play the game for the sake of getting good things done. But you have to be careful. Your first deal is like your first scotch. It burns, might make you feel nauseous. If you're like Izzy, once is enough. If you're like me, you get to like it. Then to need it.
© 1999 by George Stephanopoulos "
Table of Contents
Interviews
On Tuesday, March 23rd, barnesandnoble.com welcomed George Stephanopoulos to discuss ALL TOO HUMAN:A POLITICAL EDUCATION, a memoir by the former senior counselor to President Clinton.
J. K. Randall from New York: The President and his advisers are a unique team. They are confidants. They work out strategies together, set policies, and certainly make mistakes. The loyalty begins on the campaign trail and it continues in the White House. Many have accused you of being disloyal by writing this book. You have broken the "pact," so to speak. What are your thoughts on this?
George Stephanopoulos: Hi J. K. I agree that the President and his advisers are a unique team, and I believe that I served the President loyally and well. I also, of course, have heard people suggest that writing this book is an act of disloyalty. I don't agree. First, I decided to write this book when I left the White House in 1996. At the time, I discussed the project with the President, and he congratulated me. We both expected, I believe, that I would write an accurate account of our experience through two elections and four years in the White House -- an adventure story with a lot of ups and downs but an essentially happy ending. Second, by the time I decided to write, a number of contemporaneous histories of the first term had been written: two books by Bob Woodward, two by Elizabeth Drew, and several others. First-person accounts were done by: James Carville, Bob Reich, Dick Morris, Richard Holbrooke, Webb Hubbell, and Warren Christopher. Before the book was published, not a single person ever suggested to me that the act of writing a book was per se disloyal. A year after I left the White House, the Monica Lewinsky story broke. I was working outside the White House as a professor and political analyst. I did not believe the President's early denials and I refused to defend his actions publicly. The Lewinsky affair necessarily changed the tone of my book, because my story could no longer have a happy ending. But I do not believe that loyalty should demand defending behavior that I find abhorrent. I set a three-part test in writing this book: Are the events I describe relevant to understanding the Clinton presidency? Is my account accurate? Is it fair? I believe I have met that test and met the test of loyalty.
Julie from Hermosa Beach, CA: While reading your book (I'm only on page 123 so far), I was wondering how much the whole Monica Lewinsky affair influenced the tone of the book? And, was there any editorial pressure to add more when the incident captured national attention?
George Stephanopoulos: There was no editorial pressure to add more about Monica Lewinsky, and as you can see, it's actually quite a small portion of the book. But there is no question that the President's affair, his denials, and the impeachment proceedings that followed influenced the tone of the book. For better or worse, the impeachment proceedings are the most significant event of the Clinton presidency. I felt a responsibility to reexamine my experience in the first term to see if I could detect patterns that led to the events of 1998. I did. When you examine decisions we made on Gennifer Flowers, the draft, Paula Jones, Whitewater, it seemed to me that the events of 1998 were both wholly avoidable yet somewhat inevitable.
Jennie Holden from Dallas, TX: First, I'd like to say that I have been completely engrossed in your book, and find it a fascinating study on the seduction of power. Do you feel that age and inexperience make a political figure more prone to this seduction, or is it, in your view, a character flaw? Also, do you feel that the majority of American voters recognize the hazards of putting someone younger in the White House and will vote accordingly next time? It was a pleasure meeting you in Dallas; how's your back and neck doing today?
George Stephanopoulos: Thanks. I'm feeling fine. I don't think that age necessarily makes someone more prone to the seductions of power, but I do believe there were times when I could have used more of the wisdom that comes from experience. I also don't believe that President Clinton's flaws have much to do with his age, and it looks like our next president -- whether it's George Bush or Al Gore or Bill Bradley or even Elizabeth Dole -- will be around President Clinton's age.
Jennifer from Milwaukee: How are your friends and colleagues from your White House days treating you now that your book has come out? I do hope they are not "Elia Kazan-ing" you!
George Stephanopoulos: I've received a wide range of responses. Many of my friends and former colleagues have written and called to say they appreciate the way I've articulated many feelings they share. Others have said they thought I captured the experience well, even if they don't share all my conclusions. Others, of course, are angry. What's gratified me most is that no one has suggested that I've written a dishonest account, and even those who disagree with me have conceded that I've written a balanced account.
Christine C. from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: In looking back at your tenure at the White House, can you identify a particular moment where you had realized that you were going down a path of "no return" where you needed to compromise values or positions you had previously thought immutable?
George Stephanopoulos: I wasn't happy with all of the decisions made during my tenure at the White House, but I didn't leave disillusioned. I left grateful for the experience and proud of what we accomplished despite the many compromises it entailed. For me, the breaking point came after I left the White House. I believe that the President's relationship with Monica Lewinsky -- which was incredibly reckless given the fact that he was in the midst of a sexual-harassment lawsuit and being pursued by a special prosecutor -- was fundamentally irresponsible. Even worse, he failed to live up to his oath by lying to the country and sending his Cabinet and staff before the country to lie for him. I refused to defend this behavior.
Nancy from Princeton: You have worked for a president, written a book, been a television analyst, and taught at a university -- what's left? What are your plans for the future, and will you continue to work for ABC now that the impeachment hearing is over?
George Stephanopoulos: How about a vacation? I don't know exactly what I'll do next. I enjoy teaching and working at ABC, and I really loved writing the book despite occasional bouts of writer's block. I expect to continue with this work for awhile, but I'd also like to return to some sort of public service at some point.
Brady from Alexandria, VA: In your book, you write of past tension between you and Vice President Gore. You also write that he is one of the only people in the White House that can really poke fun at the President. He probably isn't laughing anymore after the Lewinsky scandal! Put us inside Gore's head now. What is he thinking about his chances of succeeding Clinton? Do you think he has what it takes to be president?
George Stephanopoulos: I think Gore would be a very good president. He's disciplined, intelligent, and has invaluable experience from nearly eight years by Clinton's side. Nothing can substitute for the wisdom that comes from facing the hard decisions firsthand. Gore is also looser and funnier than he appears in public. I hope he shows that more over the course of the campaign. If the economy stays strong, I think he'll be in good shape. But it's going to be tricky for him to separate himself from the President's liabilities and establish an independent presence. He's had a rough couple of weeks following the Internet gaffe, but it's still early.
S. Schirmer from Saint Louis, MO: What advice would you give now to someone who is interested in working on Capitol Hill?
George Stephanopoulos: Go for it. My first summer internship on Capitol Hill in the summer of 1981 changed my life. It's a great learning experience; it's a lot of fun, and you can do some good advancing the issues you care about.
Barbara from Everett, WA: What do you think President Clinton's future will be once he leaves office? Especially since his approval rating is dropping.... Will he ever be vindicated? When he passes on will he be honored like Nixon was, or will he go quietly into the night?
George Stephanopoulos: I think the President will try to follow in the path of former President Carter. He'll establish a library in Arkansas along the lines of the Carter Center in Atlanta and use it as a base to work on both foreign and domestic policy issues. Like President Nixon, also, he'll use his writings to help set his place in history. If President Clinton confronts the troubles of his presidency in an honest manner, I believe he can have a very successful postpresidential career.
Amanda Green from Reno, TX: I applaud your book because it gives the public so much insight into how a presidential campaign is run from the inside, as well as the exorbitant physical and emotional toll it takes on those involved. And it doesn't stop once you make it to the White House! If you could give one piece of advice to future presidential advisers, what would it be?
George Stephanopoulos: The advice my father gave me on election night 1992. He recounted the myth of Icarus -- the young man who lost his wax wings when he flew too close to the sun -- and reminded me to "keep your balance." Unfortunately, I didn't always follow that wise advice.
Moderator: Thank you, George Stephanopoulos! Good luck on the rest of your book tour. Do you have any closing remarks for your online audience?
George Stephanopoulos: Thank you and all the participants. I had a great time. Sorry I couldn't answer more questions: I'm not the world's fastest typist. Good night.